Pages

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

We started off by searching the area around the first secret
door that we had found previously. We found
spy holes looking out over entry area, rotted ropes and levers that did nothing
when pulled. Ragnar the Thugee War
Wizard and Skeorn the Thugee Cleric got a rash from a yellow mold like
substance that they touched while searching rubble in the corner. We also found large stone feet on the steps
outside above where the destroyed statue used to be.

The group then opened the secret door and found stairs that
led to a platform over the giant stone face in the large room beyond the entry
corridor where we had fought the natives in the previous session. Skeorn pulled a lever and fire shot out of
the mouth and set the firepit alight again!
While searching below the stairs, Skeorn fell into a trap door and took
some damage. He was in a room full of
statues - four on two walls and two on another wall with a passage leading out
of the room. While searching the
statues, Ragnar disturbed a group of four deadly poisonous cobras! Unfortunately, three of the four bit him and
he failed all three saving throws! (he
rolled a 2, a 2 and a 3) It was only a
matter of time before he died but Skorn had memorized Delay Poison and cast it
on him to buy him some time. We got back
into the canoes and paddled back to the village of Mantru
across the lake to see if there was anything that the villagers could do for
him but all the village shaman could do was cast delay poison again which
bought him another four hours and then he died.
We gave him a proper Viking funeral and put him in a canoe piled with
wood, set it alight and sent it adrift into the lake to burn up and eventually
sink to the bottom, so that he could rest in Valhalla
with the good graces of Odin.

There was another Thugee barbarian warrior that had recently
arrived at the village from the ship and he joined the group in Ragnar’s
place. So we headed back to TabooIsland
in our canoes and resumed our search of the Temple of the Gods. Several party members climbed back down into
the room below the trap door and resumed the search. Amul the Monk used his speak with animals ability to talk to
the cobras and asked them if it was OK if we searched the statues and they said
it was OK as long as we didn't bother them.
Besides, they said we were too big to eat and they were sorry they
killed our friend but that he had startled them and they were merely acting in
self defense.

So after searching the room, one of the elves found a secret
door in one corner of the room but we didn't open it right away. Also, Skeorn had set off a pressure plate or
something that caused a portcullis to fall over the only other portal out of
the room. The fighter types combined
their strength to try to lift it but couldn't get it to budge. Skeorn opened up a door in another corner
that had a puddle of water on the floor around it and sure enough, just like we
feared, the room quickly filled up with water which flooded down the hallway
past the portcullis and we were forced to wade in waist deep water from that
point on since the entire floor was now flooded.

So we opened up the secret door and came out into a hallway
at a three way intersection. This entire
area was now flooded as well. We traveled
down one of the branches of the hallway with Skeorn the Thugee War priest and
our new barbarian comrade in the lead. The
corridor went on for a ways and then we went up a short flight of stairs to a
landing and down a short flight of stairs to a continuation of the
hallway. Once he got to the other side
of the hallway beyond the second set of steps, he felt something brush up against
his leg and then was attacked by three normal sized crocodiles! After a brief melee, the three reptiles were
killed by the two warriors with some help from the monk and one of the elves
wielding spears and afterwards we resumed our search. At the end of the long hallway was another
flooded room in which there was a very wicked looking mace hanging on the
wall! Skeorn picked it up and kept it
since it was even more wicked looking than the one he had and looked like the
kind of weapon that would suit a Thugee War priest of Odin!

The group searched the room and the barbarian found a small
purse with some gold coins in it and a couple of small coral statues that appeared
to be worth a decent amount of money!
Aside from these items though, there was nothing else in the room. We resumed our search and back tracked back
to the three way intersection and went down another passageway. This hallway was lined with a group of cell
blocks on both sides with wrought iron bars from floor to ceiling and locked
gates designed to keep prisoners in, though it had long ago been
abandoned. At the end of the hallway we
found a torture chamber that was similarly abandoned and there were old decayed
and rusty implements of torture lying about.
So we went back out into the hallway and down at one end there was a
door that Skeorn opened.

Beyond was another flooded room but this one was very large
being some seventy feet square. As
Skeorn waded out into the water, he realized that he was on a landing that had
stairs off of it going down deeper into the water! Realizing that the water was very deep, the
Thugee cleric and the barbarian stripped off their armor so they could swim and
left their armor hanging on the statues back in the first room to keep it from
sitting in the murky water and rusting away. Skeorn swam across to the other
side of the room. There he found a wide
passageway in the middle of the one wall with a 20’ wide set of stairs leading
up. Unfortunately, the stairs were
blocked with rubble from a cave in, and it looked like the entire staircase
area had suffered a cave in long ago and collapsed. So he couldn’t go up that way. He swam across to the other side opposite the
original landing and ended up at a shallower area which appeared to be a another
set of semi circular steps in the water below, leading up to a quarter round
dais landing at the highest point before finally reaching another portal that
led out of the room.

As he started walking up the stairs through the continually
decreasing depth of water over them, he was attacked by two very large giant
crabs that swam up out of the depth of the water of the room and tried to maul him
with their four giant pincers! So Skeorn
had no armored protection aside from his shield and during the fight, they
managed to cut him up a little, but fortunately, he had help from the archers
and wizards across the room on the landing on the other side who pin-cushioned
the giant crustaceans with arrows while the two wizards hit them with magical
missiles. We managed to kill one and
hurt the other badly enough that Skeorn was able to finish it off with his
mace.

Once the crabs were defeated, he was joined by the
barbarian, the Monk Amul and Lorinar the Elvish wizard and the four swam across
the room after him searching the deep water briefly. While swimming across the water the barbarian
spotted what looked to be a giant dead crab on the bottom but didn’t think
anything of it so the three continued across to join Skeorn in the hallway on
the other side. With Skeorn leading the
way, the group made its way past some apparent rat tunnels in the walls and to
another door at the end of the hallway.
Skeorn entered the room with the barbarian and it appeared to be empty
so he started heading to the door on the other side of the room.

As he was walking through the waist deep water, he stepped
over a tripwire and suddenly a gout of burning oil gushed out of an opening in
the wall into the room and the hallway beyond burning the four characters with
an oily substance that stuck to their skin!
(kind of like Napalm!) As the
four retreated to get away from the burning oil floating on top of the water,
they continued getting burned until Lorinar realized that going under the water
actually helped to put the fire out. So
the four party members were burned a little but not too badly. After a few healing spells were cast, the
group resumed their search. This time
Skeorn swam over the trip wire to get to the door beyond and didn’t set off the
trap again. When he opened the door, all
of the water that had recently flooded the hallway and the other areas beyond rushed
out and flooded out into the hall knocking Skeorn off of his feet, and he was
pushed into an iron portcullis 10’ down the hall beyond. He was a little bruised and battered but
otherwise all right.

After the water drained out of the hallway we could see that
beyond the portcullis was a stair leading down and another door on the left at
the top of the landing. We could also
clearly see the trip wire on the floor that set off the burning oil trap which
we could now simply step over. He opened
up the door and in the hallway beyond was what appeared to be a well going down
further into the earth with gouts of heat and steam billowing up from it! Whatever was down there was boiling and hot
and best to be avoided. The barbarian
easily jumped across the well and Skeorn carefully went around it hugging the
walls. Beyond the well was another
really long passageway which the two followed until they came to the other
portcullis at the other end in the first room with the statues in it! So they retrieved their armor and put it back
on and went back around to the rest of the group that was still waiting in the
larger room above the large flooded room that the others had previously swam
accross.

While the other characters were waiting for the four to
explore the area beyond the deep water in the large room, and after the water
had receded quite a bit when it drained down the stair case, they noticed that
what we had previously though was a dead crab in the middle of the room was in
fact a very large clam! At this point we
realized that we had most likely found the location of the fabled giant black
pearl that we were sent to retrieve – it was likely to be found within the shell
of the giant clam! So Skeorn and the
barbarian showed the rest of the group how to circumvent the deep water by
going down the other hallway without having to swim and the group descended the
stair case beyond the second portcullis at the landing. When we got to the bottom we noticed it was
very hot and steamy due to all of the water running down the staircase into the
heat of the room below. We surmised that
there was some sort of natural heat source down here like lava or boiling
geysers or something. So we decided to
go back up the stairs for a bit until the steam went away or diminished a bit
and our allow our Monk to attempt to extricate the giant black pearl from the
maw of the giant clam…

Thursday, April 18, 2013

I have to say that was the most enjoyable battle we've had
since switching over to AD&D - it was very cool. I was thinking about it a
bit today and Amul really made the difference in that fight - first, he rolled
a 20 to catch an arrow in mid air and knocked another one out of the air away
from him while still in the entry tunnel after the two fighters had charged up
the stairs to the left of the tunnel to engage the archers. After realizing
that the arrows were poisoned, he fired the one that he caught from his bow and
hit one of the tribal leaders that was charging towards the rest of the group
at the tunnel entrance. This warrior failed his save and his eyes rolled up inside
of his head and he started frothing at the mouth and dropped to the floor
twitching and spasming in convulsions. Shortly afterwards, Amul finally turned
invisible from the potion of invisibility he had taken previously, and ran up
the stair with Narsil the Elf and Tobin's Ranger heading towards the archers on
the balcony above. Before the two armored fighters even made it up the stairs
they got swarmed by the warriors on the floor from below and had to turn around
and fight them to fend them off. Since Amul had finally turned invisible when
the natives reached the stair, he managed to quickly slip away from the fight
up the stair past the two fighters onto the middle of the balcony overlooking
the large room below. He fired his bow and managed to kill one or two of the
archers on the balcony and became visible while the rest of the archers
repositioned themselves further down the balcony and around the corner so they
could get shots at the rest of the group and at the monk.

In the following round, Amul realized that the shaman on the
bottom of the stairs was about to cast something really nasty on the two
fighters (Tony told us later it was hold person which could have been game over
for those two guys if they had failed their saves since they were being swarmed
by warriors) so he picked up a quiver of the poisoned arrows from the archer he
had just dropped and fired two of them at the Shaman! The first one missed but
the second one hit its mark before the spell was completed, and all of a sudden
the shaman went all glassy eyed and dropped onto the stair with white froth
coming out of his mouth and started twitching convulsively! Meanwhile, the
battle below raged on with the two clerics in plate mail holding the hallway
against a large group of warriors with Lorinar the Elvish Wizard behind them.
Lorinar managed to cast his sleep spell and dropped all of the natives on the
floor outside of the tunnel (including Skeorn, our Thuggee Cleric), except for
the ones that charged our guide Quoyoga who suddenly turned visible in the
middle of the room next to the central firepit as he was trying to cast sleep
on the rest of the archers on the balcony!

As if Amul hadn't already done enough to swing the battle in
our favor, he was left with a stark choice - go through one of the doors off of
the balcony to get out of site of the remaining ten or so archers on the
railing, and effectively withdraw from the battle, climb down to the floor and
risk being peppered by poisoned puffer fish venom arrows, or engage the
remaining archers on the balcony in hand to hand by himself so they couldn't
shoot him with their poisoned arrows! And wisely, he chose the latter option
and luckily for him initiative was tied on that round! So instead of his usual
two attacks with his fists of doom, since his weapon speed was 1 and their
weapon speed was 4 (they were using clubs) he got to make four attacks in the
round against the four guys around him! (when there is an initiative tie in
AD&D you use the difference between the two weapon speeds - in this case it
was 4 - 1 = 3 which meant that his attacks were three times faster than the
clubs so he got two extra attacks!). And of course, one was a crit so he did
damage and rolled his stunning attack and stunned one guy right before killing
him, and the other three hits resulted in three more archers going down! It was
like Bruce Lee just opened up a can of whoopass on a bunch of mooks and they
were dropping like flies!

Meanwhile, Rollo joined the fray on the stairs after
charging the mob of natives there that were attacking the fighters and kept
them from fleeing while the two fighters kept pounding on them from above on
the steps. Narsil and the Ranger eventually managed to slay their leader after
a fierce melee - Tony said he was a 7th level fighter after the battle!
Meanwhile, Amul, I mean Bruce Lee, started Karate chopping the rest of the
archers on the balcony and a few more went down and the rest started climbing
down the large demon head statue at the end of the balcony to the floor below
to get away from his fists of fury. Prior to that, the guys that had ganged up
on Quoyoga had him outnumbered five to one and managed to drop him since he
became visible in the center of the room before he could get his sleep spell
off (he was lightly armored like our opponents). Seeing his plight, our Thugee
War priest Skeorn, who Lorinar had awakened, single handedly charged them to
try to save our guide. Two engaged him in melee and the other three started
climbing up the rope to try to make it out through the hole in the ceiling
along with some of the archers that had climbed down to the floor by this
point.

Lorinar fired a few times with his bow and missed but Amul decided he was going
to try to bring the lot of them down in one shot and aimed for the rope! It was
a thick rope so it wasn't an impossible shot (Tony gave it an AC of 2) and he
managed to hit it with one of his arrows! Then Tony figured out the rope's hit
points after it failed an item saving throw to see if it actually took enough
damage to break, and Allen rolled maximum damage or close to it and it did!
Then Tony rolled to see how many guys took a d6 damage from the fall (they
probably had less than six hit points) and he rolled a six! So one guy sprained
his ankle and the rest of them were killed in the fall! Afterwards it was mop
up time and Lorinar managed to kill one of the guys fleeing down the face of
the statue with his bow and finally, the rest of them, seeing the futility of
the situation surrendered! All of their leaders were gone, their children had
managed to escape up the rope but the remaining archers, women combatants and
warriors (only about 15 left out of 40 initially) had had enough and laid down
their weapons seeing that they could not prevail.

After the battle we found a +1 spear and a +2 longsword
amongst them and a bunch of gems, a potion of flying and a nugget of
Corbitimite around the leader's neck on a string! We asked the survivors where
they had found that and they said that only the leaders knew where the
corbitumite vein was located but if we could find it and successfully mine it,
we would all be rich! Corbitumite is the fuel that powers the fires that drive
the Dragonships and is a very valuable commodity. So we brought our prisoners
back to the island and the villagers of Mantru were astonished that not only
were their enemies not demons like they believed (they were all wearing scary
demon masks), but they were in fact humans like themselves, and they were even
more amazed that we managed to prevail against them and bring what remained of
the tribe to them for judgement! So after they debated their fate, they had the
remaining evil men amongst their enemies summarily executed (they were evil
cannibals after all) and kept the women as slaves. We went back to the island
afterwards and searched the big central room which served as their lair and
found a couple of secret doors. Also, there was a tunnel leading through the
big statue's head in the main chamber opposite the entry hallway that went
straight for a ways and then turned to the right but since it was late we
called the session there.

All I have to say is that Allen had the game of his life playing the Monk who
was in his element against numerous low level lightly armored foes. That
situation was really the best kind of fight for a mid level monk who is fast
and has multiple punch attacks. I'm pretty sure he single handedly killed or
poisoned like 15 or more of them out of the 40 (poisoned leader down below with
arrow, killed another archer on the balcony with his bow, poisoned the shaman,
killed another six or so archers by himself on the balcony, shot the rope that
killed another six!) and I may have missed one or two in the count - it was a
really fun and eventful session...

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Note: this recap was mostly written by Allen who was playing Amul
the Monk at the time with edits and supplements at the end during the combat with
the natives. He posted the original
recap on the Battlebuddies RPG Forum which was created and is run by our GM Scadgrad. Allen's original recap can be found at the forum here:

We camped at the base of the mountain. The party
needed a day or two to process all of the meat we acquired from killing several
elk during a hunt that occurred during the session before (our rations were low
and we were supplementing our food by hunting - elk and Pterodactyl jerky
needed to be made). The party was accosted by a dino-armadillo creature during
the third watch that did some damage, but we were able to put it down in short
order.

The following morning the party climbed the
mountain using the rope of climbing - it was a near vertical climb! After a
brief encounter with some Pterodactyls while we were climbing (we batted them
away) the crows reached the summit and found out that we were on top of a
volcano! The party spent the night
in sub- 0 temperatures which resulted in frostbite damage for everyone - it was
perhaps the coldest night we have ever spent!! In fact it was colder than......

The following day, we ascended into the Caldera
valley. Here it was very warm and
tropical on the valley floor and the crows spotted a village on the floor of
the valley below. We guessed it had about one hundred or so island natives as
inhabitants. The village was set up for
fishing the large lake at the center of the volcano. They seemed
hostile at first, but after figuring out we were friendly they accepted us - and,
I mean accepted us! They had no concept
of personal property - simply put, what they had was ours and what we had was
theirs! The characters were all assigned
to live with different family groups and we were one with the community!

Amul mentioned to the village community that 'our sister' Paladin
Sierra was an unmarried female (a nice military-style practical joke since she
was a Paladin!)

People of note:

THE CHIEF - a small stone statue - (this might be a god idol), but we were to
respect it and talk to it as if it was a real person.

Oo-lot - "the talking chief" seemed to be the
leader and was very old, friendly, and scarred.

Fon-o – the Village Shaman was an old leader type who worshiped the "Sky God".

After staying for a while to rest up and replenish our nourishment and supplies,
the group found it had been totally befriended by the village. At this point the village elders asked us to
destroy the "Devils" that lived on the island in the middle of the lake. The island was called "TabooIsland". According to the elders these devils regularly
hunted, captured, and preyed on the villagers. After agreeing to help
them in this matter, the party set off across the lake to attack the “Devils”.
Upon our arrival, we found some "ancient ruins" which was what we had
been seeking - the fabled City of the Ancients!!!

We crossed the lake from the village to the island in the
middle in canoes provide to us by the villagers for the assault. After an initial investigation of the old
temple face on the edge of the lake, we went up some steps and found a hallway
leading into darkness. The hallway was
filled with rubble so we could only proceed single file. The crows began the advance into the hallway and
suddenly, the Paladin in front was attacked by five spear men. They were defending the "choke
point" at the end of the tunnel so we couldn't really bring all of our
forces to bear - only two people could fight at a time including one with a
spear behind the Paladin. These spear men then raised the alarm alerting their
companions beyond the entry. During the
initial melee, three spear men were killed and then the guards fell back into
what appeared to be a large room beyond the entry corridor. More natives charged in to block our entrance into
the room, but we beat them back and finally cleared the choke point and they
left a rearguard of two natives behind to cover their retreat who were finally
overcome.

During the melee we wounded one of their leaders (a spear
guy) who took 17 hits and fell back with the rest of them. When it was over, Sierra was up front with Narsil
the Sun Elf behind her and Rollo the dwarf was behind him with the rest of the
party following behind in single file.
The Paladin could see many more in the large room beyond including
archers, and it looked like they were waiting for us to charge into the room in
order to let loose with a volley of arrows and spears - and that's where we
left it. We also thought that these devils were nothing more than evil
humans in 'devil' costumes. No
gold or items where found but we did find a nice village and what seems to be
the "City of the Ancients" so it was a productive session. The next session is looking like a scrum from
the get go and should be exciting...